alt=Kelsey DallasIn the wake of Tuesday’s tragic shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, researchers are reexamining the relationship between religion and guns.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist and assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University, tweeted a chart on Friday showing the share of various religious communities that “personally own a gun.” He produced the graphic using data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study.
Burge’s chart showed that white evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are more often gun owners than other people of faith.
One-third of white evangelicals and about one-quarter of mainline Protestants and Latter-day Saints personally own a gun, compared to 17% of atheists, 17% of nonwhite evangelicals, 11% of Jews and 9% of Muslims, Burge found.
As Burge pointed out in his tweet, gun ownership is far from common within major faith groups. Even among white evangelicals, two-thirds do not own a gun.
Faith leaders have at-times encouraged personal gun ownership as a way to boost security at houses of worship. In 2020, LifeWay Research found that nearly half of Protestant pastors (45%) said “their security measures include having armed church members.”
“Combining this with the percentages who say they have uniformed police officers or armed security personnel on site, 51% intentionally have firearms at their worship services as part of their security measures,” the report said.
Houses of worship across the country have been the target of gun violence multiple times in recent years.
Earlier this month, a lone gunman attacked Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Hills, California, killing one man and wounding five people. Law enforcement officials have said the shooter was motivated by bias against the Taiwanese community.